Subject: Registration of RTP payload format names

From: Stephen Casner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 11:48:39 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

[bcc'd to rem-conf for the AVT working group]

This is a request from the Audio/Video Transport working group to
review draft-ietf-avt-rtp-mime which defines a procedure to register
Real-time Transport Protocol payload formats (encodings) as audio or
video MIME subtype names.  The draft also registers all the RTP
payload formats defined in the RTP Profile for Audio and Video
Conferences as MIME subtypes (RFC 1890 which is being revised as
draft-ietf-avt-profile-new).  The move to establish this procedure was
instigated by Keith Moore and Harald Alvestrand for two purposes:

  - To use the existing MIME namespace for audio and video encodings
    to be transported by RTP rather than creating a new namespace as
    RFC 1890 implicitly did.

  - To increase the number of encodings available for use with
    existing MIME transport modes.

Not all of the RTP payload formats represent encodings that make sense
for other transport modes, or at least it will be necessary to specify
how the media data should be packaged for those modes since just
concatenating a sequence of packet payloads won't be sufficient.  The
draft currently just registers the names for RTP transport and leaves
the specification of packaging for other modes to future drafts.

Your review is requested in particular for the registration procedure
which says what additional information is required to specify RTP
transport of a media type.  The current version of the draft is
draft-ietf-avt-rtp-mime-00.txt, but it is about to be updated to -01
(before draft deadline) with some minor additions.  If anyone has
comments right away, those can be addressed in the update, otherwise
the review will be on the -01 version.

As new RTP payload formats are defined in the future (beyond those
included in RFC 1890 and its revision), each of those RFCs should
include its own registration template.

I believe you have already been informed of one such RTP payload
format specification that happens to fall under "text" rather than
"audio" or "video", i.e. draft-ietf-avt-rtp-text-XX.

							-- Steve